Dwarf Fortress 2012 (Updated 3/15/2013 - 0.34.11 - Mirrors in OP)

This thread drug me back in to DF. I was wondering though about the lazy newb pack. It runs behind a bit compared to the most recent game version. Can you plug in the newest game version and run it with the LNP launcher?

I'm pretty sure the game is a LITTLE more complex than "dig into a hole and close it"

Granted, just learning the UI probably requires 20+ pages.

DF is definitely NOT a game made for people who don't like learning by error.

Well... You CAN make the dig-a-hole-and-hide method seem like pretty much the entire game to someone who doesn't know better.

I started a game on my laptop and hadn't made defenses yet, but still recieved a four-legged-glass forgotten beast that just wandered into the map, He took out my best miners and like 30 dwarves. The frosty Bastard didn't even do anything redeemable like destroy the elf caravan that was there and give me free stuff.

If it weren't for the fact that the new version of DF runs SO SLOWLY on my system, I'd run another Ars Succession game. But, sadly, I haven't upgraded since the LAST Succession game, and while there were some optimizations around that time that greatly improved the game's speed, there have been a lot of features added since then that have dragged performance back down again.

If it weren't for the fact that the new version of DF runs SO SLOWLY on my system, I'd run another Ars Succession game. But, sadly, I haven't upgraded since the LAST Succession game, and while there were some optimizations around that time that greatly improved the game's speed, there have been a lot of features added since then that have dragged performance back down again.

Yeah but this is a new fort I've only gone down a few levels, I thought that the magma buildings only appeared on the list once you had actually located magma on the map.

from the wiki

Quote:

A Magma smelter is a special variation of the basic smelter that uses magma as a source of heat, instead of fuel. Like all magma-powered buildings, it is not visible under the Build menu until your dwarves discover a source of magma to power it.]

Yeah but this is a new fort I've only gone down a few levels, I thought that the magma buildings only appeared on the list once you had actually located magma on the map.

from the wiki

Quote:

A Magma smelter is a special variation of the basic smelter that uses magma as a source of heat, instead of fuel. Like all magma-powered buildings, it is not visible under the Build menu until your dwarves discover a source of magma to power it.]

so where is it?

You might be seeing it because of a bug and because your last fort found magma. There have been a few bugs with some stuff from previous forts not being cleared, like squad names and schedules. I have never seen it happen with magma, but it seems possible.

Keep digging Wudan. As mentioned there is always a magma sea if you dig deep enough. Sometimes it's close to the top and sometimes you got to go down far. I've seen a magma sea start around 40 levels on one map and then one sea start at 190 levels. You just got to keep digging down.

Yeah but this is a new fort I've only gone down a few levels, I thought that the magma buildings only appeared on the list once you had actually located magma on the map.

from the wiki

Quote:

A Magma smelter is a special variation of the basic smelter that uses magma as a source of heat, instead of fuel. Like all magma-powered buildings, it is not visible under the Build menu until your dwarves discover a source of magma to power it.]

so where is it?

You might be seeing it because of a bug and because your last fort found magma. There have been a few bugs with some stuff from previous forts not being cleared, like squad names and schedules. I have never seen it happen with magma, but it seems possible.

In my previous game I got cave moss and mushrooms in my top fortress floor as soon as I started digging. I had found the caves in the preceding game so it looks like DF forgot to forget that.

I just lost my fort to a siege, nothing special except that I was three pumps away from finishing my pump stack to power my magma defense. I also learned that some vampires are basically ninjas, he or she drained 8 dwarves in my dormatories without being seen, despite the fact that I use those rooms for training my military to keep a constant watch for vampires and to watch my suspected were-dwarf. I am also not sure why my suspected were-dwarf never transformed into anything, he was clearly bitten by a were creature.

So I have been playing with a population cap of 20 (which resulted on 27 or so dwarves) and the game has been much more fun. I seem to have an overproduction of food though and thing seem to go a bit slowly.

I have been playing with cage traps, these are fun and I got a bunch of goblin thief prisoners which I don't know what to do with.

My weaver got possessed and I thought I had everything he could possibly want except wool so he failed his mood and he went mad! When he died his two months old daughter become unhappy but other than that everyone seems acting like nothing happened. His wife become the new weaver naturally.

I have iron and chalk in this map so I finally can make steel for the first time. I lucked out and got a moody weaponsmith early (sadly when I only had iron available). I'm only missing an armorsmith. What would the fastest method to level up one?

So I have been playing with a population cap of 20 (which resulted on 27 or so dwarves) and the game has been much more fun. I seem to have an overproduction of food though and thing seem to go a bit slowly.

I have been playing with cage traps, these are fun and I got a bunch of goblin thief prisoners which I don't know what to do with.

My weaver got possessed and I thought I had everything he could possibly want except wool so he failed his mood and he went mad! When he died his two months old daughter become unhappy but other than that everyone seems acting like nothing happened. His wife become the new weaver naturally.

I have iron and chalk in this map so I finally can make steel for the first time. I lucked out and got a moody weaponsmith early (sadly when I only had iron available). I'm only missing an armorsmith. What would the fastest method to level up one?

Honestly, I make steel armor to train them up. On maps with iron and flux, I find that I have so much of it I could make everything I ever wanted from steel. I find the need to armor dwarves a lot more important than making sure the armor is of the highest quality. If you make extra, you can melt the worst pieces to get some of the steel back. When melting use a single smelter, each piece gives fractions of a bar back, and if you keep it to a single smelter you can minimize the number of fractional bars that won't be recovered.

So I had a fortress going with about 230 dwarves or so. Had a vampire, found him, had him hauled off. He's permanently stuck in my hospital, in a bed, having both legs crushed by my hammerer. Which sucks, because the guy was an awesome bonecrafter, but he killed two of my early furnace operators and my woodcutter. He won't die, he hasn't had anything to eat or drink in _years_. Just...there.

I earlier had accidentally turned my river stagnant (a mistake I won't ever make again), so I ended up building an underground cistern for my dwarfs, one that wouldn't freeze in the winter, with a water purifier to pump it in (btw, if you didn't know, pumps clean water!) Had that going.

Also embarked in a location with a waterfall. Although it was stagnant, dwarfs still love it. So I built a natural waterfall room. There was the problem of sudden freezing in the winter, but I didn't get a chance to find out what would happen. Why?

Because I got greedy. I was getting tired of looking for metal that wasn't copper, and had found adamantium. So I did what any good dwarf overseer would do, and went for it. As luck would have it, it was hollow on first strike.

Next time, i'm going to work on conqurering the lower caverns before attempting to scavenge up adamantite. I had totally avoided them before, but I had easily squashed the two forgotten beasts I had to deal with topside. Maybe I just got lucky with easy ones.

I just tried modding adamantine to be as common as tetrahedrite (in other words everywhere) while I wait for the new version. I had ambushes showing up in the first year with all that fortress wealth. I also had my Queen in the first real migrant wave during the second year. She showed up dressed up like a peasant. Turns out she was also a vampire, and does not even try to hide it, she was just Queen Enum the Vampire. At first I was panicking about how I was going to kill her because I hadn't had time to set up a proper noble magma bath room. Then a goblin ambush jumped her, and she proceeded to slaughter them with her bare hands, shrugging off their blows and shattering bones with her punches. Turns out she had 1,600 kills before she arrived at my fortress. So, I started working on a way to keep a steady supply of worthless dwarves to feed to the Queen. Unfortunately, I had three more ambushes take out the fortress (adamantine brings out the goblins like crazy) the Queen was one of the last to fall, at least crippling seven of the 20 or so goblins who swarmed her at the end.

Just a warning, adamntine is very slow to produce, and it takes a lot to make items, 9 wafers for a breastplate, 4 for an axe and so on. For comparison, steel take 3 and 1 respectively.

So I had a fortress going with about 230 dwarves or so. Had a vampire, found him, had him hauled off. He's permanently stuck in my hospital, in a bed, having both legs crushed by my hammerer. Which sucks, because the guy was an awesome bonecrafter, but he killed two of my early furnace operators and my woodcutter.

Haven't really looked at the newest version, but there's got to be some way to isolate them from the rest of the population (combination of burrows, airlocks and levers?) and still have them be productive members of society. Might not be worth it for, say, bonecrafters, but might for something like metalsmiths or pump operators.

They don't die without blood, but like a dwarf without booze they become terribly slow. It is probably best to set up a set of floodgates or drawbridges and burrows to allow dwarves to control who is fed to the vampire.

Probably the easiest way to get in with tilesets is to just download the Newb Pack from the DF forums, which will provide you with all 3 popular sets. I'm personally partial to the Mayday set due to easy at-a-glance dwarf identification and also nostalgic reasons, but he hasn't been updating it quite as much as some of the others as far as I can tell. The Ironhand tiles are nice and still reasonably easy to identify at a glance, but I didn't like the environment quite as much. The other major option is made by Phoebus, which are nicely detailed, but it kind of gets lost at a glance. YMMV, of course.

My biggest problem (and the reason I stick with Mayday) is that I need to be able to identify stone and ore quickly by sight. I wish that all ore looked the same, but there are a few stones that look like ore.